Category Archives: Materials & Equipment

Threads, fabrics, hoops, needles and everything else that is used in embroidery

Felt for finishing and an unexpected use for metallic kid

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I’m beginning to get quite a collection of finished Floral Laces – some with quite startling combinations of felt and stitching (wait till you see Fuchsia …) – here are two I finished while we were on holiday in the Outer Hebrides. One of the things I’m considering doing with them when I’ve got them all done is getting a square framed cork board, possibly paint it black, and then display them by rotation. Yes, felt is wonderful stuff, and not just for finishing Floral Lace – remember these hand-dyed felts I got at the Knitting & Stitching Show last year? I haven’t actually decided what to use them for yet, but they’re lovely even just to look at, and I think they’ll make a beautiful backing for something or other.

Floral Lace: Rose Floral Lace: Sunflower 21st Century Yarns felt

And backing is not the only thing you can do with felt, of course. Here is my recent purchase from Blooming Felt: gift tags and a purse. I’m not sure yet what designs to use them for; obviously they need to be quite small. Perhaps a shortened version of the smaller Window on the World for the purse? And I may have to design something new for the tags, although there are only so many things you can do in such a small space; or the little cross I’ve used for baptism bookmarks might make quite a pretty gift tag for a christening gift!

Gift tags and a purse from Blooming Felt

Remember the metallic kid I used for Treasure Trove? It came in very useful yesterday, though not for any needlework. One of my belts works really well with 2 or 3 of my dresses, but the snag is that the loose end won’t stay put. When I put the belt on first thing in the morning the end bit curls snugly enough around my waist, but as soon as I move, it does too. I tried sticking it to the belt with blutack, but that started affecting the surface of the belt. It obviously needed a loop of sorts to hold it in place, but what could I use that wouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb? And then it struck me – the belt is made of metallic leather, in warm shades of copper and gold. So I dug out the left-over gold kid and it turned out to go with the belt perfectly. I was about to sew the leather together when my husband suggested contact adhesive; it proved to be a fortuitous suggestion, as I made the loop a little too wide the first time, and this way I could gently unpeel rather than laboriously unpick. So now I have a lovely fitting belt; I knew having lots of stash was practical!

Gold kid used as a belt loop

Finishing florals, part 5; and a tale of two squissors

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Yes, I have finally completed the buttonholing on one of the 18 “proper” Floral Laces! Using the more spacious of the two buttonhole versions worked well – having the buttonholing closer to the stitching than it is now would have looked rather cramped, I think. The back looks better than I’d expected, with the scalloping producing rather a decorative effect. All in all, I’m pleased with it and will, over time, finish the other 17 in the same way.

Floral Lace, with scalloped buttonhole edge The back of the buttonholed Floral Lace

I’ve also been trying to get some more squissors, my former supplier having decided they wouldn’t do them any more. They very kindly put me in touch with their suppliers, and it all seemed to be going splendidly (apart from the complications of ordering from a country far, far away) until 100 pairs of squissors arrived. They looked just fine, all titanium-coated and colourful. But when I had a closer look at one and tried it out, it turned out that not all squissors are equal – these were far thicker and less pointy than the ones I had before!

Not all squissors are equal

Fortunately I’ve got enough stock left to be getting on with for the moment, and the new ones have now been returned to the supplier who will send out the correct ones this week, I’ve been told. So no need to panic quite yet, there may not be a global shortage of accurate, thin-bladed, fine-pointed squissors after all!

Chocolate, a dress, and a golden idea

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Oh dear – a Knitting & Stitching Show, some worrying family news and a severe cold and before you know it there hasn’t been a FoF for two weeks. Time for a few musings, however brief!

Let’s start with the Spring K&S Show, which like the autumn one at Alexandra Palace makes a great excuse for a few days in London, catching up with my sister-in-law, the odd friend, and London’s parks. You people who live in London, do you appreciate those parks enough? They are wonderful! Well, as my visit coincided with some gorgeous spring weather, there were plenty of people out there appreciating and enjoying them, especially in St James’ Park, which to my delighted surprise had some pelicans again, as well as swathes of colourful flower beds. Is it any wonder that embroiderers throughout history have tried to capture flowers in all their cheerful gorgeousness using threads, ribbons, yarns and what not?

The Show didn’t have that many needlework threads, unfortunately – the emphasis was definitely on dressmaking, quilting/patchwork and knitting/crochet, and home furnishing. But I did catch up with Mr X Stitch who had a wonderful display there, much of it created by young stitchers; and there were … chocolates! A bit dangerous, you would have thought. The last thing stitchers want anywhere near their projects is chocolate. On the other hand, after the umpteenth unpick, or a particularly tense bit of cutting, suddenly chocolate is beginning to look like an essential stitching accessory! And the truffle selection also made a very useful thank-you to my sister-in-law for having me to stay.

Did I mention there were a lot of dressmaking stalls? Well, some of them specialised in vintage dresses. And as it happens, my husband’s birthday present to me this year is a 1930s dress to go with our little vintage car. Strictly speaking it should be a 1920s dress, but I’m afraid I am simply not a 1920s shape (was anyone ever? I mean, naturally, without the aid of corsets?). And after all, who’s to say that a lady might not have bought a new dress when the car was seven years old? I got some really nice ideas from the vintage patterns that were for sale and the lovely fabrics available, so this summer when we have a week of vintage car activities I hope to be able to dress the part; all I need to do now is work out what sort of hat they’d have worn in 1932 or thereabouts.

Another thing I need to work out is whether to add more gold to Treasure Trove. Apart from the last bit of border all the surface work is now done, so just the cutting and then the bars and beaded filling stitches and it’ll be done according to the chart. But I’m thinking it may need a bit more goldwork. At the moment it’s got the four padded gold kid medallions, and some gold-coloured beads and perhaps that’s enough. But in my stash I have some lovely gold and silver wire with what I think is the best name for a needlework material – pearl purl. You couldn’t make it up smiley.

I first got to use it at a RSN goldwork workshop that I attended at the 2012 Ally Pally show, where we worked a lovely 3D dragonfly. Pearl purl is the stuff used for the top wings, and its tail (or body). It’s a very tightly coiled wire which you pull ever so slightly and then couch down (only partially in the case of the body). I liked it so much I bought some at one of the goldwork stalls, but I’ve not had a good excuse to use it since. Those slightly empty-looking bits of Treasure Trove might be just the excuse I was looking for!

A goldwork dragonfly done at the 2012 K&S

Putting things together and building things up

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Not too much stitching this week, but a lot of preparation – I’ve been putting the kits together for the Knitting & Stitching Show workshop next month (there are still some tickets available), and getting some more card and felt for the Dunchurch workshop in June. For the pink floral card I can’t quite decide whether it looks better with the baby pink or the bright fuchsia felt! By the way, did you notice the small coloured rings that hold the threads for the K&S kits? They were an unsuccessful attempt at finding a replacement for my light wooden storage rings; unfortunately they were far too small to store full skeins of perle on, but they turned out to be just the right size to hold the threads for one Hardanger patch – and they look bright and cheerful into the bargain.

Putting together the workshop kits Card and felt for the Dunchurch workshop kits

Another thing that needed some preparation and putting together was Treasure Trove. I’ve done a fair bit of the surface stitching (just half the border to go) so it was time to start on the goldwork. For this I needed 4 tiny yellow felt circles, 4 slightly larger yellow felt circles, and four gold kid octagons. After some deliberation I decided on 8mm and 14mm for the felt circles; the gold octagons would be cut from 2cm squares. I measured everything carefully, cut it all, and then panicked – surely these minute bits of felt and kid couldn’t possibly be the right size? But fitting them to the running stitch outlines I had previously worked as a guide, they were just right. I could see I was in for some very fiddly stitching, securing first the smallest circle, and then the larger one covering it, both accurately centred inside the running stitch outline.

Gold kid and felt cut to size for Treasure Trove

As it looked like the sort of stitching that would need fierce concentration, I decided to do it at my very chatty and distracting stitching group. Apart from one knot-and-loop at the back of my work which I noticed too late (and subsequently secured behind previous stitching rather than unpick the whole thing) it all went remarkably smoothly, and I ended the session with what one of my fellow stitchers called “four felt blobs”. She obviously wasn’t altogether sure whether anything else was going to happen to them, but I reassured her that the rather garish yellow blobs would in fact be covered in tasteful antique gold. I would have started on it there if it hadn’t been for the fact that I forgot to bring a sharp needle, and my size 28 tapestry needle simply refused to go through the kid!

Two layers of felt built up, waiting for the gold

So just a little bit more to do on Treasure Trove – and then I need to stitch the blue-and-silver version…

Serendipitous hoops

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If you’ve recently looked at the Workshops page you will know that we’ve got several planned for this year. The two London Knitting & Stitching Shows will probably not surprise you, but why on earth one at Dunchurch Baptist Church? For a very simple reason – I am a member there, and we are raising funds for a new building.

The rather sad reason why we need a new building is that the old one, built by the members themselves in the 70s, is falling to bits. The much more joyous reason is that it’s getting too small! But whatever the reason, a new building needs a new budget. As anyone who has ever tried to raise money for a good cause will know, it takes a lot of ingenuity and creativity to come up with enough events and projects that will interest people. Our Elders decided to start from the Parable of the Talents – anyone who wanted to was encouraged to collect £10 from them, and to use that money to raise more in whatever way their particular talents suggested. So far this has yielded a Murder Mystery Evening with 3-course meal (tomorrow, and we’ve got tickets!), a Christmas Cookbook (recipes to be handed in in March and cooked/baked in April – book to appear just before the Village Fête), an Arts & Craft Exhibition with cake stall, a sponsored walk/run/cycle ride/pram push, several Quiz Nights, a Beetle Drive (I had to look that one up smiley) and a concert. Oh, and a Hardanger workshop.

It wasn’t until I’d offered it and picked a date that I realised I’d need twelve 4″ hoops. When I teach at the Knitting & Stitching Show, hoops are lent us for the duration of the workshop, but here I’d have to provide them myself. And oddly enough I didn’t have twelve 4″ hoops just lying around…

As you do nowadays, I Googled hoops, and found that even with my husband’s and my £10 pooled I wouldn’t be able to afford twelve. Until I came across a Gumtree ad. Eight red 4″ flexi-hoops. The hoops were somewhere in Wales (I think), and only local pick-up was specified, but I thought I might as well contact the seller and see if they’d be willing to post them. The lady was very helpful and said yes, she’d be happy to send them. I asked if by any chance she had any more hoops. “Not red ones,” she said. “But I do have twelve green ones.”

Just the right number, and for a great price that was well within our Talent budget – they were obviously meant to be! In the end I bought the eight red ones as well, on the grounds that some workshoppers might like to buy one to take home. And here they are: my serendipitous collection of hoops. Now all I need is twelve people to use them on Saturday 28th June.

A lot of 4-inch hoops

Kate is brilliant!

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My belated Christmas present arrived earlier this week: a collection of beautiful Sparklies fabrics. I’ve used Kate’s fabrics several times before – among others in Windmills, Frozen Flower, Flodgarry and Patches – and although it is of course possible to stitch those designs on standard coloured Zweigart Lugana, the irregular look of hand-dyed fabric just adds a certain something.

Windmills Frozen Flower Flodgarry Patches

And here are the ones I got this time: Fire, Gina’s Delight, Lemon & Lime, Pumpkin Patch and Triton; Dark Goddess in linen, and Harvest Blush; plus samples of Innocent Princess, Sunlit Forest and Pitch. Isn’t Kate brilliant thinking up and producing such a wide range of colours, from the palest pastels to the brightest oranges and pinks and blues, and that amazing dark purple?

My Christmas present from Sparklies

When I showed them to my husband he admired them admirably, but then asked the W-question: What did you get them for? Fortunately being a designer means that I can say “for inspiration”, and it’s true at that – as I ironed them and got them ready to be photographed, just looking at them gave me several ideas about threads to use with them, and I am now fairly certain I’ll use Pumpkin Patch (the muted orange) and Sunlit Forest (the sample of pale sage green) for the two Orpheus designs, which I’d originally planned on Zweigart’s Burnt Orange and Moss Green. The perle colours I had already intended to use with those two fabric shades also work perfectly with the two Sparklies fabrics!

Dark Goddess and Sunlit Forest Lemon & Lime and Fire Pumpkin Patch and Triton

Storage solutions

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I don’t know whether the word is still as fashionable as it was a while back, but do you remember how practically anything you could buy was a solution? Software solutions (programs), packaging solutions (cardboard and parcel tape), gardening solutions (compost, plants, seccateurs), stationery solutions (pens, paper, staples) and, of course, storage solutions (boxes). Well, once upon a time I had the perfect storage solution for my un-bobbined threads – hinged metal rings with thin varnished light wooden rings on them, and cheap & cheerful plastic clip-shut boxes.

Perle storage

Then the thin, varnished light wooden rings were no longer to be had. And the hinged rings weren’t easy to find in the right size any more. And the Dutch shop where I bought the plastic boxes was out of the size I wanted. Obviously, I should have stocked up in a big way on all those three parts of my storage solution when I had the chance! But is there any stitcher who has a realistic idea of how many threads she will have in a year’s time?

So I now have two half-sized boxes, smaller metal rings and larger, thicker and rougher wooden rings. Not ideal, but they’ll do, and it is still a joy to play with my lovely new threads. But when I’d finished putting the pre-cut perles onto my wooden rings, I came to the next challenge – Threadworx’ overdyed Vineyard silk. Unlike their perles and stranded cottons, the silks don’t come in pre-cut lengths. And unlike the perle cottons, which may look pretty and dainty but are quite sturdy underneath, the silks really are as delicate as they look and I wouldn’t dream of putting them on those untreated wooden rings, even though I did sand them to get rid of the worst roughness. So what to do with them? The obvious answer is to do what I do with all my other silks and wind them on plastic bobbins. But that means keeping them with the other bobbinated threads in one of my bobbin boxes, and I particularly want to keep them with the Threadworx perles as they are meant to go with some of the #8 perles instead of a #5.

Have you ever known an object really well only to realise after years of use that they have a particular feature? That sounds a bit complicated, but here is what I mean. I have wound threads onto bobbins for years. I know them back to front. Flat white plastic things with a hole in the top end. Subconcsciously I knew that hole was there. I even knew it was there because some people keep them on hinged metal rings. The metal rings are, after all, sometimes known as bobbin rings. But because I keep bobbins in bobbin boxes, this idea never really made it into my conscious mind. Until yesterday,when it suddenly came to me that I could have three rings of perles-on-wooden-rings, and one ring of silks-on-bobbins, and keep them in the same box.

So I did – but there was one last complication. There were rather more Threadworx threads than I’d realised so I now had four rings of perles and one of silks, and they wouldn’t fit into the half-sized box. A bit more stash rearranging was obviously called for, and eventually the Threadworx collection ended up in my wooden thread box, while my DMC/Anchor variegated perles now inhabit one of the half-sized boxes, and my House of Embroidery perles the other.

My Threadworx collection and how I store it Anchor and DMC variegated perles House of Embroidery perles

Storage problem solved!

For now…

Want to see my pretty threads?

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First of all a very Happy and Blessed New Year to everyone! And I hope you had a lovely Christmas too. You may have noticed (but then again, with all the festivities going on, you may not) that Flights of Fancy was rather quiet over the festive season, and this was because my husband and I were away for most of it, visiting his parents for Christmas and my family for “Oud & Nieuw”, as the new year’s celebrations are known in the Netherlands.

Fortunately I did manage to get quite a bit of stitching in (the Floral Lace series is now almost complete), and even some stash acquisition. Some time ago I treated myself to a collection of Threadworks threads, but as I bought them from a Dutch company it was cheaper to have them sent to my mother’s address, so that I didn’t actually get to see and play with them until last week. They were worth the wait though – just look at those gorgeous colours! On the right are some perle #5/#8 combinations, then a few #5 singles, then some of their extremely strokeable overdyed Vineyard silks, and on the left some perle #8/Vineyard combinations. The silks are really soft and I have been petting them to within an inch of their lives smiley.

Threadworx threads

While in Holland I also picked up a few more thread storage boxes; well, they are just general purpose storage boxes really, but they are very useful for those threads that I keep on rings. I really wanted one box like the three I already have, but unfortunately they were out of those, so I bought two half-size ones. At a little over 1 euro each I didn’t think they were too extravagant a purchase…

I did make a rather extravagant purchase only yesterday, but I had an excuse: my very kind parents-in-law gave me some money to spend on stitching materials (well, on anything I liked, but I think they had a strong suspicion it would turn out to be stitch-related!) and I had for some time had a little wish list of Sparklies hand-dyed fabrics, so I had a lovely browse on her website and got my list plus two other colours and a few samples. Just got an email to say they are being dyed, so I should be able to show them off quite soon!

The quest for wooden rings

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*sings* On the fifth day of Christmas my postman brought to me – 200 wooden rings! And here they are:

200 wooden rings, pre-sanding

You may wonder why he brought 200 chunky, unvarnished wooden rings, a bit rough round the edges and in need of sanding. And the answer is, “because I can’t get the slim, petite, varnished wooden rings that I really want!

It won’t surprise you to know that I possess a fairly wide range of perle cottons. #8 and #12 come in balls, and that’s how I store them. #5 comes in skeins; those I cut open so that I have about 25 1-yard lengths, which I then attach to a small wooden ring, which in turn is attached to a larger, hinged metal ring with others of a similar colour. Here is one of my “green” rings.

A ring of greens

When I started this system, I bought a pack of 20mm light wooden rings on eBay; they were nice and slim so the hole was big and easy to thread a skein of perle #5 through, varnished smooth, and marker pen was clearly visible on them. But isn’t it always the case? You find something useful and you don’t buy enough to keep you going for a few decades, thinking you can always get some more. Ha! After a while (stash always grows more quickly and, well, just more than you expect) more rings were needed, but the only ones I could find were much thicker. Still, they were light-coloured and smooth, and they worked.

Two thicknesses of light wooden rings

More stash expansion, and more rings needed, especially as all Threadworx threads (perle of all thicknesses as well as stranded cotton) come in pre-cut lengths, and are therefore much easier to store on rings than on bobbins. But light wooden rings were suddenly a thing of the past, so I had to settle for dark wood – the first lot I got was nice and thin, then they too started to grow more solid. And of course marker pen was not at all easy to read on the dark surface; I tried a white gel pen but it smudged. Trying to think outside the box I had a fling with some white plastic rings (possibly meant for shower curtains, I can’t remember), but although the numbers were easy to read on them, threads wouldn’t stay put and worked themselves loose. Something to do with too little friction, I suppose. There are, of course, those lovely Kelmscott mother of pearl thread rings which are light-coloured and just the right size, but at £6.50 for 10 they would soon deplete the budget.

The dark ones and the plastic ones aren't nearly so user-friendly

Then I found some light wooden rings again. Hurray! They weren’t quite what I was looking for – 23mm instead of 20mm, and quite thick, and unvarnished and a bit rough looking, but not too expensive and worth a try. They took quite a bit of sanding, and about 25 of them were just too rough to entrust my pretty threads to, and they are definitely a lot more chunky than I would have liked; on the other hand, they are legible and they hold the thread well.

The new rings are a lot bigger

But if by any chance you do happen to find some 20mm varnished light wooden rings, about 3mm thick, could you let me know?

Waiting for threads and playing with cards

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We’ve been playing musical rooms over the weekend. Eldest now has his own flat, we wouldn’t mind a bigger bedroom and the business could definitely do with some more storage (that’s the vintage car business, not Mabel’s Fancies, alas), so we’ve been changing things around and after a couple of days of lugging furniture around we’re now pretty much settled, apart from deciding what pictures to put up on the freshly painted walls of our new bedroom and moving a few more boxes into the new storage room.

One of the side effects of all this chopping and changing was some stash re-arranging, always a pleasant occupation and particularly relaxing in the midst of what almost felt like a house move at times. A small chest of drawers I had been using has been reassigned to the new guest room, and I get the larger one that was there originally, and a space in the new storage room to keep it in (so a bit of Mabel’s Fancies storage in among the car bits after all!). It means that I can keep things like my fabrics and some thread storage boxes in a more accessible way instead of piled up on top of each other – much more convenient. I’ve even got some spare space to fill up with new stash…

That might well be a box of Threadworx perles. Some time ago I found a wholesaler in The Netherlands whose prices are really good, and I decided to treat myself to a good selection of hand-dyed perles for the festive season. I’ve ordered them, and they’ll be sent to my mother where we will pick them up on our next visit to Holland. It’s difficult to be patient as I’m really looking forward to seeing them in the flesh (or rather, fibre) and have a play with them.

For now I’ve got other colourful things to play with and put in my nice large chest of drawers, though: lots and lots of aperture cards from Craft Creations. My favourite large squares which are perfect for Round Dozen and Floral Lace, some large circles, and also some smaller ones for quick cards, plus 40 with a much smaller aperture which I hope to use for Christmas cards next year, filling them with different-coloured versions of the freebie stars.

Aperture cards from Craft Creations

Now all I need to do is get round to actually putting all those stitched projects I have lying around into the aperture cards and send them to people!